two mantras before tasting

Now I know that the term 'mantra' is over-used and misused so let's agree that mantras are phrases that, when repeated, help promote concentration. They aren't chants that dull you out, they're beacons that guide you in.

We know that we don't taste in a vacuum: we taste in a cacophony of senses, ideas and emotions. We also know that the minute you decide that you like something or not, you stop really tasting it and go off on a jag of self-congratulation about having figured this particular taste out.

Maybe it's possible that deliberately calibrating your attitude toward what you're tasting, even using a convenient mantra, could slow you down and allow you to taste more and more deeply. Let's try this:
prepare yourself for tasting with these two mantras:

• this is an unfamiliar taste and it puzzles me
• this is a familiar taste and it reassures me

Repeat them each a dozen times or so. Imagine feeling the puzzlement or the reassurance. Now taste your way through dinner or along the buffet line.

for more like this, see here.

What happened?

Speaking of Taste

Coming back to teaching about wine and beer after having  spent a sabbatical with poetry, memoir and fiction, I found myself a lot less preachy than I was. I've lost a lot of my certainty about the relationship of pleasure and tradition, less enthralled with a canon of the good, the true and the delicious.  As a former student of anthropology, I wasn't surprised that America's taste has changed. I found myself wondering how it was possible that mine had.

Where is this taste of mine and ours? I mean that literally. Where does it hang out? On the tongue? In the nose? In memories of mother's milk and matzoh brei?

So I've been reading. Not so much to reduce my own confusion-I've been happily confused for a while now-but for the sake of being an honest idea broker to my students. Where's the pulpit from which you can preach the Good News of a revolution in beer and food? What do I tell the apprentice sommelier or Cellermaster* about what tastes good?

Here's what I've got so far: The experience of flavor comes from deeper in than we thought. It's not on the tongue or in the nose, it's in the brain. The processes the brain uses to recognize flavor turn out to be a lot like the processes it uses to recognize music or complex shapes (like faces). We're very good, us humans, at remembering music or picking a face out of a crowd or a lineup, but we're not very good at talking about it.

You can recognize your mom when you see her face on the post office wall, but you probably can't describe her to me all that well. You can pick out Ravel or the Rolling Stones after a few notes, but can you tell me how you did that?
With visual art, we have a deceptive fluency. You can probably tell me a lot about Girl with a Pearl Earring. You can describe her face, her clothes and pose. Maybe, if you're anthropologically inclined, you could talk about the relationship of servant girl to bourgeois master and the resultant slight look of apprehension on her face.

But when the image is not a simple narrative anymore, not even a complex and affecting one, you and I may find it harder to talk. What could I tell you about Matisse's Blue Nude that wasn't trivial?

And suppose representation is barely a concern. Imagine the artist is showing you how her hand works with some colored chalk and a mad case of the swirlies:

You can probably describe this fairly well, but would your description give a listener any sense of what the drawing was?

Let's take it even furnther. We may have some sense of what this next painting symbolizes, but when we try to describe it, we sound sort of silly:

When the intent is ironic, we're even more lost. What will you say about Duchamp's readymades like Fountain, which is simply a urinal mounted on the wall? How will you describe it after the joke fades and you're just looking at white, shiny curves mounted next to a little museum card?

And what if we suspect that we're being manipulated by an image in an ad or that the artist is having some fun with us? We can do a pretty good job of listing visual characteristics, but how much can we describe the truth about an image like this:

Or this:

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All of this is to say that we folks obsessed with food and drink aren't at more of a descriptive disadvantage than our friends the music and art lovers. Our perceptions are as profound and our descriptive powers just as strained. Next week, we'll talk about prying our way into this profoundly obvious and maddeningly non-verbal topic. 

In the meantime, look out for this shelf talker:

*for information on the Cellermaster Certificate, contact Dean Kelly McClay at the Academy of Culinary Arts: mcclay@atlantic.edu

Bud wants to buy Coors even if you don't

When the giants of the beer industry make a strategic move, it's got to effect all the midgets, right? Right?

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AB InBev just made its third offer to buy SABMillerCoors, this time offering $104 Billion. Financial analysts are saying that it's just a matter of time before an offer is accepted. If you're wondering what this merger will mean for the world of beer, it might be good to take a look at how InBev has handled its earlier acquisitions. Their first move was to slash operating costs. Then, according to today's New York Times, they:

....turned their attention to the supply chain, replacing higher cost inputs with lower cost ones — thinner glass bottles, cheaper ingredients — and pressing suppliers to give them twice as long to pay for goods. ....

Along with cutting costs, they raised prices for products slightly, so that the additional pennies from the sale of each can of, say, Bud Light, fall almost directly to the bottom line.

Those higher prices also help mask what some analysts now say is the flaw in the model: falling market share. Anheuser-Busch sold 107 million barrels of beer in 2008 in the United States when the Brazilian investors acquired it, but it sold just 96 million barrels last year, according to Beer Marketer’s Insights, a trade publication. In almost every year, it has lost nearly one point of market share.  (emphasis added)

 This merger isn't likely to have an immediate effect on craft breweries: we have two shrinking giants joining forces to shrink together. But these huge corporations are unlikely to die in their sleep. They certainly see where the sales growth is and they have the means to purchase that growth even if they can't emulate it organically from their own businesses. 

Absent from this article is any mention of AB InBev's purchase of other, smaller and craftier breweries. It seems likely that the new conglomerate will go shopping for smaller, faster-growing breweries. It also seems likely that they will pursue their current strategies for cutting costs. Look for more Faux Craft and Mock Premium labels. Look for jaunty labeling and tongue-in-cheek, flannel shirt marketing directed at both genders and listen for talk of taste, freshness and specific mention of ingredients.

Will the beer get better? Stay tuned.

Read the whole article at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/business/anheuser-busch-inbevs-growth-playbook-starts-with-its-checkbook.html?emc=edit_th_20151011&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=21549315

Beer Evangelist on Television?

Some thoughts about Beer on television and a total loss of Dignity:

Beer Evangelist on television? Believe it brothers and sisters!

A Purist and a Modernist Walk into a Bar

When I started working on the rum book, http://amzn.to/1Mnl2zl I was pretty sure what I wanted to do. I wanted to look at noble, fragrant, complex, wood-aged rums: the type of liquor that's served in snifters and consumed slowly, even reverently. I had the suspicion-maybe even the conviction-that rum was a serious, big deal sort of thing, somewhere above single-malt scotch and maybe (just) below cognac. The suspicion was fed by tastes of great, budget-priced rums (Mt. Gay) and exquisite and exquisitely expensive ones (Zacapa).

I was infused for a while with missionary zeal. I think I was hoping to find the rum snobs of the world and go off in a corner where we could all talk about esoteric little bottlings and feel quite content with ourselves. I was a purist and I wanted to meet other purists and convert the uninitiated.

My own drinking history has only lately been touched by purism. I was never a wine snob (purism's semi-identical twin): I was just as happy with a grapey-ripe fruit bomb as I was with an elegant super-tuscan. I'd love a d'Yquem one day and then trot off happily with a banyuls the next.

Beer was, I admit, a bit different. There was a lot of product out there that didn't taste very good. Some of it was so bad that the only thing it could be compared to were nauseating, sweet cocktail confections made with cheap rum. I was a beer snob almost from my first bottle of Saison Dupont, but this was a snobbery that was based on childish delight. "Ooooh! Taste the pretty bubbly!"

Purism is more a matter of thinking than delight. It's a kind of ingredient specific thinking. The best X must be the most reverently produced, additive-free example of its kind-an original recipe that outdoes others only in its adherence to the antique original X. The real beef lover will only allow some salt and perhaps a crank of pepper. A true baseball fan despises the designated hitter. A proper rum enthusiast will allow nothing but sugar cane in the bottle and maybe a splash of water in the glass. And so on.

When I started some serious tasting, what I discovered made me abandon the purist approach. It even led me to question and finally reject the whole notion of purism. What derailed my approach to purism was a sudden appreciation of Modernist cooking. This epiphany happened at a tavern in Philadelphia called Kraftwerk and I'll tell you more about later, but first let's talk about the Purist and the Modernist.

The Purist is humble in the face of the idea that the grape knows more than he does. The Modernist doesn't care about what a fruit might think and owes her allegiance to her imagination.

The Purist

You know this guy: he drinks single-malt scotch, maybe the occasional cognac. He takes his liquor straight, at cellar temperature in a thin-walled glass-a tumbler for the scotch, a snifter for the brandy.

He (it's almost always 'he') is horrified at the thought of soda, visibly pained at the notion of a cocktail.

He is a conoisseur, someone proud of his knowledge of the difference between good and bad. He's also a purist, someone who revels in, even worships the idea of a pure, uncompromised thing in itself.

He likes the solos at the jazz club, the consommés at the restaurant. He also takes a certain pleasure in the elevation of his purism above your trashy compromise. He almost needs to snort at your brandy alexander in order to fully enjoy his VSOP.

He's an easy object of fun, both because of the supercilious attitude that often accompanies his pronouncements and for the shaky intellectual ground on which they stand. (was the scotch purer the minute it came out of the still? What about the adulteration of it by aging, then diluting? )

But there is something sweet, almost romantic about the purist-some quality that we have to admire and to which many of us aspire. Admiring things in their simplicity, he turns our attention ot the beauty in less, encourages a restrained horror of more. There is an elegance in the drink from the artisan's still or the winegrower's vat or the brewer's barrel. There is also a suitable humility in our recognition of that elegance by simply leaving it the hell alone as we put it in a glass.

The Modernist

Suppose you could take a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich on a brioche, extracted all its flavors and textures and rearranged them. Imagine further that you transformed smoky bacon into a chewy roll, made crispy strips of tomato and layered them with leaves of brioche and doughy, eggy, buttery slabs of lettuce. Does that sound awful? Does it offend the purist in you? Hmm.

The modernist position on food is that no food owns its own properties and that any manipulation we can do in service of foody fun is not only justified, it's holy, worthy, artistic work. The aim is to create new experience, not to honor old ingredients. So let's compress a slab of cucumber in a vacuum bag and turn it into pemmican, then let's sprinkle it with gin and serve it before dinner where the cocktails used to be. You're not defiling the cucumber, you're helping it realize its potential.

Once you make the sensation the center of culinary effort, you change the whole view of ingredients. Can you imagine a single-malt sorbet? Could you imagine its taste as it melts on a jelly-soft square of sous-vide cooked salmon that's waiting for it in a nest of deep-fried dill leaves?

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You can probably imagine how pleased I was when I saw the difference between the modernist and the purist as the key to understanding how to approach the disorderly subjects of rum and beer. (I was somehow assuming that wine belonged to the purists alone.) Nothing like a nice dichotomy to tidy things up. In this corner, ladies and gentlemen, the aging world champion, The Holy Ingredient: in the opposite corner the scrappy inventive challenger Sensation by Any Means.

Unfortunately, a few minutes after I started congratulating myself on solving the book's big conceptual problem, I knew that I was at least partially wrong. The modernist depends on the quality of her ingredients, the purist (mostly) values the objects of his desire for their ability to create sensations. The Aristotelian A-or-not-A becomes the Buddhist A-and-not-A.

Zacapa in a snifter and a Dogfish Head Wit Rum Mojito are closer than you might think. I wonder if seeing them as organically connected, as each simultaneously themselves and the other, will make rum more fun to drink. I wonder if today's modernism becomes tomorrow's Purism.I wonder what to make of Budvar Pilsner in the face of All Day IPA. Is what we think the only thing that matters? And do we really taste without thinking? We'll see.